JOHN SMART
FORESIGHT SPEAKER, CONSULTANT, AUTHOR
John Smart is a global futurist, foresight consultant, and entrepreneur. He is CEO of Foresight University (Ann Arbor, MI and Los Gatos, CA), a foresight training consultancy. He is also founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit focused on understanding and describing human adaptiveness in a world of accelerating technological change.
John’s expertise is in foresight development. His mission is to help leaders, entrepreneurs, and teams to develop best-in-class foresight process, master the Eight Skills of Foresight and Action, and achieve more adaptive futures for themselves, their teams, and their organizations.
For a list of these and other key foresight books, see The Foresight Guide, 2016.
Good futurists (foresight speakers) present important and potentially relevant ideas, trends, data, and questions about the changing competitive environment to your stakeholders, in a way that entertains, inspires, and generates robust discussion and better strategy, plans, and actions. I’ve been a full-time futurist since 2000, and have delivered keynotes to hundreds of satisfied audiences.
Good foresighters (foresight professionals) help your team improve strategic discussions about the future, elicit and map diverse and relevant opinions, uncover implicit assumptions and key disagreements, find better data, models, drivers, trends, constraints, and weak signals to reduce uncertainty, and generate improved forecasts, scenarios, real options, and plans. Above all they should help you identify, benchmark and strengthen your current foresight process and culture, so that stakeholders can get better at identifying and reaching preferred futures. I’ve developed undergraduate and graduate courses in foresight, and I consult in foresight process and culture for dozens of leaders and their organizations.
Futurists and foresighters may not know more than you about the long-term future, especially in your subspecialty. But the better ones are constantly learning, teaching, and consulting about global and industry trends, innovations, and strategic responses to change, and can help you and your team see and adapt ahead of your competitors. In a world of accelerating technological change, good foresight process and culture are incredibly valuable to every leader and organization. Let’s talk and see if I can bring value to your audience and your team.
John Smart is CEO of Foresight U (Ann Arbor, MI and Los Gatos, CA), a foresight learning and development organization, and president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit studying adaptiveness under conditions of accelerating technological change. He is also founder of FERN, the Foresight Education and Research Network, creating curriculum for the 22 MS/PhD programs globally that offer strategic foresight degrees.
Before launching ASF John spent nine years as an educational and software entrepreneur, co-founding and building Hyperlearning, an educational services company sold to The Princeton Review in 1996. He is a lecturer on leadership and technological change at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA), an advisor in foresight and forecasting at Singularity University (Mountain View, CA), and a technical advisor to NextIT (Spokane, WA), a leader in intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) platforms. John has authored several next-gen IT foresight studies, including the Metaverse Roadmap, the Conversational Interface and Open Internet TV. His new book, The Foresight Guide: Being a Leader in Anticipating, Creating and Managing the Future, is free online now and debuts on Amazon in 2018.
As a scholar, John is co-founder of the Evo Devo Universe research community, an international community researching evolutionary and developmental processes of change, and a member of the ECCO research group at VUB (Brussels, Belgium).
John has a BS in business administration from UC Berkeley, an MS in futures studies from the University of Houston, a BS-equivalency in biology from UC San Diego, an MS-equivalency in physiology and medicine (two years of medical school and the USMLE-I) from UC San Diego School of Medicine, and has done postbaccalaureate studies in biological, cognitive, computer, and physical sciences at UC San Diego, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. He studied living systems theory at UCSD under the mentorship of James Grier Miller (Living Systems, 1978), who mentored under process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Dr. Miller encouraged John to pursue multi-scale studies in technological, economic, and social change from a complex adaptive systems perspective.
John’s twitter account is @johnmsmart. He blogs at Medium and Substack on foresight and leadership.
When You’re Ready to Get Serious about the Future
Foresight Speaking & Keynotes
John speaks to the C-suite, to strategy, policy, R&D and HR teams, to university students and the public on a range of industry and organizational foresight topics. He does presentations and runs seminars (Q&A sessions) and workshops (small group breakouts and report backs) on three main themes:
1. Foresight Development
- Universal Foresight (Preparing for Accelerating Change)
- Personal Foresight (Personal Visioning and Strategic Planning)
- Global Foresight (Societal and Sci-Tech Trends and Scenarios)
- Organizational Foresight (Methods and Models)
2. Adaptive Management and Leadership
- The Do Loop: Eight Skills for Adaptive Foresight
- The Five Goals and Ten Values: Adaptive Leadership
- Lessons for Leaders: Profiting from Accelerating Change
- Foresight Culture: Predicting, Creating, and Managing the Future
3. Global Technology Futures
- Natural Intelligence (Deep Learning)
- Natural Security (Societal and Technological Immune Systems)
- Ten Areas of Technology Change
- Personal Sims (Smart Agents, Groupnets, Valuecosm)
- Mediated Reality (AR, VR, Lifelogs, iTV)
Specialty industry and organizational foresight topics are available on request.
What People Say About John
John blogs at Medium on foresight and leadership. His twitter account is @johnmsmart.
Select articles:
The Truth about Bitcoins and the Blockchain: Part 1—Bitcoins, A Real Future, 2017
The Truth about Bitcoins and the Blockchain: Part 3—Regulatory Needs, and Promising Startups, 2017
Your Personal AI: Part 2—Why Agents Matter, 2016
Your Personal AI: Part 1—Your Attention Please, 2016
The Powerful and Intimate Future of Groupnets, 2015
Leadership of Technological Change, 2014
What will Disappear by 2030? An Introduction to Global English, 2013
Leadership Foresight and Security: How We Should Have Won the Vietnam War, 2013
Saving the Titanic: Crowdsourcing to Find Hard Solutions, and Unlearning to Implement Them, 2012
The Metaverse Roadmap: Virtual Worlds, Mirror Worlds, AR, Lifelogging, ASF Study, 2007
Measuring Innovation in an Accelerating World, TF&SC, 2005
Human Performance Enhancement in 2032: A Scenario for Military Planners, US Army LTA Brief, 2004
The Conversational Interface: Our Next Great Leap Forward, AccelerationWatch, 2003
Select books:
Introduction to Foresight, Executive Edition: Personal, Team, and Organizational Adaptiveness, KDP, 2022
The Foresight Guide: Anticipating, Creating, and Managing the Future, ForesightGuide.com, 2020
For more, see John’s Slides Archive.
Corporate Foresight Consulting
Adaptive Foresight: The Do Loop
Which of these four steps and eight skills are personal strengths? Team strengths? Which need improvement? Are you measuring and improving each of these skills on your team?
(Feel free to mouse over this graphic for details).
Adaptive Foresight Development (Eight Skills)
Branding and Marketing Research
Change Management and Leadership
Data Acquisition and Analytics
Design Thinking and Gamestorming
Digital Competitiveness
Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship
Forecasting and Modeling
Foresight Process and Culture
Ideation and Innovation Management
Intelligence, Security and Risk Management
Personal and Team Foresight
Technology Assessment and Scouting
Scenario Planning and Learning
Strategy, Analysis and Planning
U/X and Usability Studies
Wargaming and Simulations
CONTACT
For speaking inquiries and date reservations, feel free to contact John directly. You may also contact John’s agent,
PHONE
John: 650-468-4462 m
Alvis: 323-898-6277 m
EMAIL
John Smart
johnsmart@gmail.com
Alvis Brigis
alvisbrigis@gmail.com